St. Louis gains as Southwest backfills American's dropped flights
Lambert-St. Louis International Airport is now one of the 10 busiest airports in Southwest Airlines' route network.
The St. Louis-Post Dispatch reports on that development, writing "St. Louis has finally regained a place of prominence with a major U.S. airline" after being "buffeted by wave after wave of American Airlines flight losses over the last decade."
Lambert-St. Louis officially took its spot among Southwest's top 10 earlier this month as the airline continued with its recent growth spurt there. Southwest now offers 91 daily departures (not including subsidiary AirTran) from St. Louis, putting the city at No. 10 — just behind Oakland and its 100 daily departures on Southwest.
"We're thrilled about it. To be in their top 10 is a pretty big deal," Lambert Airport Director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge says to the Post-Dispatch. "I think there are a lot of cities out there that would die to have that status for Southwest."
St. Louis, of course, once was one of the USA's major aviation hubs. However, the city's aviation stature began to teeter when primary tenant TWA ran into financial problems that culminated with a series of bankruptcies in the 1990s.
TWA was then acquired by American in 2001, which assumed TWA's St. Louis hub as part of the acquisition. But American began unraveling its St. Louis hub — accelerated in part by the post-2001 downturn in travel — and eventually de-hubbed the city altogether.
Today, American (along with its regional affiliates) is No. 3 at St. Louis with 35 daily departures, according to the Post-Dispatch. Delta is the airport's No. 2 carrier as measured by daily departures (39).
But even Southwest has had its ups and downs in St. Louis. The Post-Dispatch notes that Southwest had about 90 daily departures from Southwest in the 1990s, though that number was not enough to crack Southwest's top 10 at the time.
Southwest's St. Louis schedule dipped to a low of 58 daily departures in 2004, though "the number of flights picked up significantly in mid-2010 in concert with cutbacks by American," the Post-Dispatch writes.